Abbie Cornish Astonishes in Australian Filmmaker Cate Shortland’s Debut, Somersault

SOMERSAULT 

(Cate Shortland, Australia, 2004, 106 minutes) 

In her directorial debut, Somersault, Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland turns the idea of the unlikable protagonist on its head by portraying her central character with the kind of empathy this young woman craves. 

Sixteen-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish with white-blonde hair and eyebrows, lending her a look both feral and ethereal) has been coasting through life on her looks. She doesn't appear to have any particular interests, though she does carry a scrapbook and a glue stick with her wherever she goes. 

The film has hardly begun when she seduces her mother's boyfriend, Adam (Damian De Montemas). She starts by asking about his tattoo, touching it, and giving him a kiss. Things proceed from there–until her mother, Nicole (Olivia Pigeot), catches them in the act. After making herself persona non grata, she catches a bus from Canberra, where Shortland grew up, to the alpine resort town of Jindabyne where she knows exactly one person. 

 

When her attempt to stay with the former fling goes awry, Heidi drops by a local watering hole, and finds Sean (Ben Tate), another man with whom to crash, though he's mostly just looking for a good time. She gives him what he wants, but it's unclear if it's also what she wants (Cornish, 21 at the time, has several nude scenes). After Sean and his friends--who appear to be skiers--head back to Sydney, she's on her own again, looking for a job and a place to stay. 

She meets Joe (Avatar's Sam Worthington with a spiky mullet), the son of a wealthy farmer, at a rustic diner. They banter for a bit, and though he seems to find her attractive, he isn't exactly swept off his feet, possibly because of the age gap. Convinced they made a connection, she insists on coming home with him, but things end much as they did with his predecessor. Fortunately, kindly motel manager Irene (a warm, maternal Lynette Curran) gives her a temporary place to stay: her metal-head son's old apartment. 

Heidi gets a job at a petrol station next. Though she and Joe meet again, it's hard to tell if he just likes sleeping with her, or if he likes her as a person. 

He's more reserved, and as it turns out, has problems of his own. The actors have chemistry, though–quite a bit. Since Heidi doesn't have any friends, there's a sense that she doesn't know how to relate to women her own age, with the possible exception of her coworker Bianca (Hollie Andrew).

 

This isn't the kind of film where the director focuses exclusively on the central character. Once Joe enters the scene, Shortland shows what he gets up to when he isn't with Heidi. He has one friend, an older gay man (Erik Thomson), who doesn't judge him, and another, a straight man around his age, who does. That friend considers Heidi low class, loose–a slut. 

 

There's another man in town, Bianca's stepfather (Paul Gleeson), who shares the same sentiments, because Heidi flirted with him when she was looking for a job, a decision she comes to regret. He engages in a form of sexism that may not be overt, but it's definitely insidious, and leaves her feeling more like an outsider than ever. Though it's hardly great that she put the moves on her mom's boyfriend, this confused young woman is more than her worst impulses. If anything, she makes the tightly-wound Joe uncomfortable, because she wears her heart on her sleeve. 

 

In Jindabyne, Heidi comes to find she can't run away from her problems when the primary problem is her. It doesn't mean she deserves the treatment she receives, or that she doesn't deserve happiness, just that she needs to learn to have more faith in herself and not to let others define her. 

 

Fortunately, none of this is heavy-handed. Heidi does eventually have a breakdown, but it forces a necessary reckoning. By the end, she isn't so unlikable after all. At the very least, she's more understandable. Nonetheless, in looking through the film's original reviews, I found that women responded more favorably to the film. Two male critics went so far as to describe Heidi as "trampy," which makes me think they missed the point of the thing (kudos to Scott Tobias and Neil Young for their more considered responses).  

 

As for Cornish, she's quite astonishing, whether singing "The Clapping Song" to herself while wandering through the forest or dancing in her skivvies to Alvin Stardust's "My Coo Ca Choo," she's always alive in the moment.

 

I get why Australian actors who made their mark at home would move to the United States where they can secure work that pays better and reaches more people. It worked for Nicole Kidman and for a while it worked for Eric Bana and Simon Baker, too, though both actors eventually returned to Australia where, to my mind, they’ve been doing more interesting work.

 

Since she moved to the States, Cornish has been working steadily, and for all I know she's perfectly happy, but I believe she's given her best performances in Australian films, like 2006's Candy with Heath Ledger and, especially, Jane Campion's 2009 Bright Star with Ben Whishaw. 

In the States, she's worked on more commercial projects that have asked less from her to the extent that Somersault might startle anyone only familiar with Sucker Punch, Limitless, or Prime Video's Jack Ryan, because she absolutely holds the screen in an intensely challenging role.

 

Unlike her leading lady, Cate Shortland has worked primarily in Australia. A surprising exception was Marvel's 2021 standalone feature Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson. On the basis of her previous, modestly-budgeted features, that's not a move I would have seen coming, though her track record as a director of women-in-peril films led Johansson to insist on her, telling Variety that 2012's World War II-set Lore is "a perfect film."

 

Actors and directors sometimes meet at just the right time, and that was the case with Shortland, who was making her first feature after several shorts, and Cornish, who was playing her first lead after several supporting roles. 

Somersault is an exceptionally fine film, eminently deserving of restoration and rediscovery. It's beautifully shot by The Hunter's Robert Humphries and scored with delicacy and restraint by Sydney outfit Decoder Ring, resulting in something simultaneously electric and affecting in its depiction of the kind of young woman too easily dismissed as "easy" when she's anything but. 

 

Somersault plays New York's Metrograph through Feb 28 and opens at Austin Film Society Mar 8 and Toronto's Paradise Theatre Mar 13. No Seattle dates yet–if at all–but it comes to VOD Mar 27. Images from Film Movement via Reverse Shot (Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington), Google Play (Cornish), TV Guide (Cornish and Lynette Curran), and AFI (Cornish).  

What’s Cooler Than Cool: Michael Almereyda’s Vampire Tale Nadja with Elina Löwensohn

NADJA 

(Michael Almereyda, USA, 1994, 

93 minutes) 

I say what's, what's cooler than being cool? (Ice cold)

--Outcast, "Hey Ya!" (2003)

 

The essence of 1990s cool, Michael Almereyda's black and white mood piece infuses German Expressionism with post-punk attitude. "Nights…nights without sleep," Nadja (Romanian-American actor Elina Löwensohn, who had appeared in Schindler's List the year before) intones at the outset as the filmmaker superimposes her image over fog-enshrouded New York City.

Almereyda then catches up with Nadja on a date explaining that she doesn't have to work, because she comes from money. Her father didn't have to work either, and for the same reason. The night ends with Nadja feeding on her date. She may not have to work, but to survive: she needs to feed.

Cinematographer Jim Denault shot the sequence in Pixelvision–a toy camera created by Fisher Price–and the effect is more arty than scary even as the ravenous vampire ends up with blood all over her face. I was also reminded of surveillance footage, something which will play into Almereyda's 2000 ultra-paranoid, modern-dress version of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke. 

As Nadja's late-night perambulations continue, she drops by an underpopulated, Edward Hopper-esque diner where she asks Lucy (actor-turned-author Galaxy Craze), an androgynous-looking woman, for a light, and they proceed to smoke and engage in a rather personal conversation for two people who just met. She appears to be looking for a friend when she confesses things like, "I'm so alone," but as the evening continues, their platonic rapport turns sexual--even though Lucy isn't exactly single.

While Nadja flirts, fucks, and feasts her way across the city, Van Helsing (Peter Fonda in longhair-hippie mode) kills her father and plots with his nephew, Jim (Martin Donovan), Lucy's oblivious husband, about how to eliminate more of her kind. To him, vampires are "raving idiots, insane, monsters, deformed, the walking dead." A silent movie-style flashback, which evokes F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, suggests he used to feel otherwise. 

(Since Fonda also plays Nadja's father in flashbacks, it's worth noting that the Beatles took inspiration for 1966's "She Said She Said" from Fonda's declaration, "I know what it's like to be dead," while tripping on acid.)

Beyond Murnau, Almereyda drew from Bram Stoker's Dracula, André Breton's semiautobiographical novel Nadja, Carl Theodor Dreyer's gothic horror Vampyr, and Lambert Hillyer's Dracula's Daughter, a stylish 1936 film about an aristocratic foreigner (below) seeking out London's prettiest necks.

Though Nadja seems lonely, she has a male companion, Renfield (Almereyda mainstay Karl Geary), but he's more like an assistant--"a slave," as she puts it--than a friend or lover. She also has a twin, Edgar (Jared Harris with passable Romanian accent), except he's in a sort of coma, though it isn't clear if he's a vampire or just severely anemic. His nurse Cassandra (Suzi Amis), Jim's sister, serves as his companion. (Three years after starring in Titanic, Amis married James Cameron, and stopped acting around the same time. It's possible she doesn't miss it, but seeing her again made me a little sad.) 

With Nadja's help, Edgar gets better, while Lucy, who has fallen under her sway, gets worse. What appears to be a case of vampirism, however, turns out to be more of a psychic ill, since Nadja, like Countess Marya in Dracula's Daughter, can also communicate and control minds telepathically. 

Though Nadja could rest on her laurels after hypnotizing Lucy, she sets out to make Cassandra her next victim, which leads the nurse to flee Edgar's abode, except no one can ever really escape the vampire. The chase leads to the twins' Romanian castle at which the entire extended family will meet. 

I'm not certain how Almereyda decided which sequences to shoot in 35mm and which in Pixelvision, though it seems more random than not with the exception of the more violent encounters. Then again, Nadja follows his second feature, 1992's Another Girl, Another Planet, also with Löwensohn, which Jim Denault shot entirely in Pixelvision before transferring to 16mm. 

There isn't a lot to Nadja, but if you surrender to its spell, a good time awaits, and I found the final sequence quite transcendent. It also predicts the cool-cat vampire tales to come, like Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, which takes place in the beautiful ruins of Detroit and Tangier, and Ana Lily Amirpour's Farsi-language A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which transfers Persian and French New Wave aesthetics to suburban Bakersfield. 

Nonetheless, the story of its making is nearly as compelling as the film itself, since David Lynch and then-wife Mary Sweeney produced and funded the picture--Lynch also cameos as a loopy morgue attendant--and Peter Fonda, who would receive a richly deserved Oscar nod for Victor Nuñez's Ulee’s Gold only three years later, was so enthusiastic about the project that he flew to New York on his own dime and volunteered his services (not the done thing for an actor at any level). I would like to think that Van Helsing's reflective sunglasses are a nod to his mirrored shades in the era-defining Easy Rider. 

Almereyda also stacked the deck with alt-rock and trip-hop, but while working on the restoration with Arbelos, he axed the Portishead and My Bloody Valentine tracks to make way for more of Simon Fisher Turner's shimmering score. This will surely disappoint fans of the original version, though Fisher Turner's score really is pretty terrific, and it was probably quite a coup in 1994 to secure the services of Derek Jarman's favored composer.  

The central character, however, remains the same. When it comes to vampire films, the casting is crucial, and Bucharest-born Elina Löwensohn, with her Louise Brooks-meets-Anna Karina good looks, spectral intensity, and deadpan affect is as perfect for the role of Nadja as Hungarian-born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, aka Bela Lugosi, was for Count Dracula.

Nadja, in a new 4K edition, opens at The Beacon Cinema on Fri, Feb 13. Images from Le Cinema Club (Elina Löwensohn), Center for Contemporary Arts - Santa Fe (Löwensohn and Galaxy Craze), MUBI (Gloria Holden), Indiewire (David Lynch), and Arbelos / Grasshopper (Peter Fonda).  

The Return of Los Golfos ("The Delinquents"): Carlos Saura's Searing 1959 Neorealist Debut

LOS GOLFOS / The Delinquents 

(Carlos Saura, Spain, 1959, 84 minutes) 

Los Golfos is one of the most uncompromising films I've ever seen about the trap of poverty. 

Carlos Saura, in his feature-film debut, doesn't even make his protagonists especially likeable, though they're always engaging. He simply shows them building to a plan that could set them on the path to prosperity–or leave them with nothing. There's no middle ground; it's either success or failure. 

Granted, the Spanish title translates as The Delinquents or The Hooligans, but Saura, who began as a director of documentary shorts, isn't being strictly metaphorical, and nor does his film, which he shot on location in Madrid's less photogenic neighborhoods, qualify as exploitation fare. It falls squarely in the neorealist camp, something I wouldn't say about his more stylized flamenco films, like 1983's Oscar-nominated musical Carmen. 

And unlike the American B-movies of the time, these guys aren't tricked out in leather to race around on motorcycles. They're just trying to get by. 

It's always a risk to hitch your wagon to a star, but it's the best option around, so Juan (Óscar Cruz) has been training to become a matador, and his friends will do anything to help him out. Juan is taking a risk, too–the biggest, really–because not everyone is cut out to be a matador. He's also motivated by a porter job that has him lugging heavy baskets of produce. 

For what it's worth, Juan has no reservations about plunging banderillas (long pointed sticks) into bulls' backs. What might seem like animal cruelty to an outsider–and I'm not saying that it isn't–is par for the course for the aspiring matador, who doesn't come across as much of a deep thinker. 

For anyone who struggled with Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, which centers on an abused donkey, or Albert Serra's bullfighting documentary Afternoons of Solitude, which features several abused bulls, Los Golfos could prove a tough sit, though Saura mostly focuses on life outside the ring. 

Right: Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey in Afternoons of Solitude

At first, I assumed the quintet was acting primarily out of loyalty and friendship, but it's only toward the end that it becomes clear they're looking to become part of a matador's entourage, which doesn't exclude loyalty and friendship by any means, but Juan is as much a potential meal ticket as a friend. 

Though the film has abundant Spanish flavor--plaintive flamenco guitar, heartrending folk singing--the narrative could have just as easily centered on a basketball player in Harlem, a football player in South Central, or any number of other athlete-in-the-city combinations. Some professional players are more than happy to share their largesse with the hometown crew.

The film begins as one of the youths robs a blind merchant, the first sign that they aren't stealing from those who can take a hit, but from those who need the money as much as they do. If anything, their victims come across as more sympathetic, but that's Saura's point: they're victims, too. Victims of a system that benefits from their exploitation–little surprise that the film was censored in Spain, even after a well received premiere at Cannes. 

Later, they steal parts from trucks and motorcycles to sell for cash, and they rob a man who's simply going home from work. For what it's worth, they aren't armed, they don't kill anyone, and they don't inflict any permanent injuries, but they're as forceful and intimidating as necessary. 

They also have a moll in Juan's self-possessed girlfriend, Visi (María Mayer), who assists with some of their schemes, like the time she lets a patron cozy up to her at a bar while Ramón (Luis Marín, a standout among the mostly non-professional cast) attempts to lift an unattended wallet. As Juan tells Visi after a night of romance–a sequence censored in Spain since they're pictured in bed–"If I'm lucky and I win, I'll get you out of this place." 

Marín also appears in the terrific 1957 short, La Tarde del Domingo, a damning portrait of a family of oppressors from the perspective of their put-upon maid (Isana Medel); it's included with the new Radiance release.

To Saura's credit, there are no weak links in the cast. Because he keeps exposition to a minimum, it took me a while to sort everyone out, but that has nothing to do with the performances. The filmmaker found young men with distinctive features and personas, who work well together, though most--Marín aside--would leave acting behind afterward. 

The risks intensify when Juan meets with promoter Don Félix (Arturo Ors) to inform him he's ready for competition. Don is happy to oblige, but only if he pays 20,000 pesetas upfront. I'm not sure if he's taking advantage of Juan's inexperience or if it's pay-to-play for all first-timers, but Juan and his friends decide it's worth the price to send him on his way to fame and fortune. 

Since petty crimes won't add up quickly enough, they plan one big score instead. Nothing works according to plan, but these delinquents are relentless, and they won't let anything stand in their way. Since Los Golfos is neorealism bordering on noir, they'll have more unpleasant surprises ahead. 

Saura ends on a note of cruel irony. That isn't to suggest that he's cruel, though you could see it that way, since the director created the pitiless scenario (he wrote the screenplay with director Mario Camus and journalist Daniel Sueiro). If anything, he had to tone down the politics, since the censors rejected the previous anti-fascist projects he had proposed.  

In Michael Eaude's Saura obituary for The Guardian, he states that "its implicit critique of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco meant that it was forbidden in Spain for another couple of years." Because the 1962 release was censored, it had to be pieced together for this 4K restoration, so it's fortunate the missing elements were accessible, thus restoring it to the version that netted a Palme d'Or nomination at 1960's Cannes Film Festival. 

In the history of Spanish cinema, Carlos Saura is often placed, chronologically, after Luis Buñuel–who also worked in France and Mexico–and before Pedro Almodóvar as the top three filmmakers. (Saura, who dedicated Peppermint Frappé to Buñuel, also considered him a friend.) 

The Criterion Collection has reissued five of his features, including 1976's stunning Cría Cuervos… with his one-time companion Geraldine Chaplin; four of those films are available exclusively as part of box sets, while 13 are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. 

So, he's hardly an unknown quantity, and it isn't hard to see many--though not all--of his films. Nonetheless, I hadn't heard of Los Golfos until Radiance reissued it last fall, and I'm not sure why, but I think it's a combination of a troubled afterlife and because it doesn't quite fit with the rest of his 44 non-fiction and narrative features, even though he was a fairly restless talent with wide-ranging interests. 

It's a tough-minded picture fueled by fury that doesn't just speak to Spain in 1959, when it was made, but to any country in which young, working class people have few opportunities to better themselves–a situation hardly unknown in the United States, especially in its more impoverished regions. 

For my money, it bears comparison with José Antonio Nieves Conde's Surcos ("Furrows"), Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados ("The Forgotten Ones"), and Fellini's semiautobiographical I Vitelloni ("The Layabouts"), and deserves nearly as much acclaim as those celebrated early-career films. 

Los Golfos is out now on Blu-ray with author and curator interviews, two short films (including 1955's La Llamada), a handsome booklet featuring an excellent essay, "And the World Goes Round," from British critic Mar Diestro-Dópido, and other contextual extras. Another winner from Radiance Films (available in the US via MVD). Images from Slant Magazine, Pere Portabella (Óscar Cruz), Grasshopper Films / The New York Times (Andrés Roca Rey), Blu-ray.com (Luis Marín), the IMDb (Cruz with María Mayer and Arturo Ors), and Gianni Ferrari / Getty Images / Le Monde (Carlos Saura in 1966).

Writing a Life: Kristen Stewart’s Triumphant Directorial Debut, The Chronology of Water

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER 

(Kristen Stewart, USA, 2025, 128 minutes) 

"It's all a series of fragments, repetitions, pattern formations…" 

Kristen Stewart's full-length debut, an empathetic adaptation of The Chronology of Water, adheres to the fragmentary form of Lidia Yuknavich's 2011 memoir, a recollection of the incidents that shaped a troubled and ultimately joyous life, but not always in chronological order (it follows Stewart's 2017 short Come Swim). It isn't, after all, how we remember things, and both book and film play like a swarm of vivid memories. 

They aren't Stewart's memories, but after eight years and 500 drafts of the screenplay, she must have felt as if she had earned joint custody.

Much like RaMell Ross's adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys and Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, even individual sequences are fragmentary, since DP Corey Waters often skews the 16mm compositions. 

Instead of full-frame bodies or faces, he captures parts of the whole, frequently emphasizing texture over shape. It's a sensual approach, though so intimate it can prove disorienting until the fragments take fuller shape and start to cohere thanks to editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm's intricate work.

The film begins with a stillbirth. Lidia's older sister, Claudia (Thora Birch), comforts her as she (Imogen Poots) processes a loss she associates with water–she associates everything with water–because Lidia is, or was, a competitive swimmer. As she crumples to the shower floor, and as the water continues to flow, blood that once sustained a life now runs down the drain. 

One minute, she's an adult, and then she's a child with an alcoholic stay-at-home mother (For the People's Susannah Flood) and an abusive architect father (German actor Michael Epp, convincing as a native Pacific Northwesterner). Swimming is something she's good at, and it's also an escape. Other coping mechanisms include journaling, collecting rocks, and re-reading her sister's copy of Vita Sackville-West's St. Joan of Arc. 

The film continues to toggle between childhood and adulthood (Angelika Mihailova and Anna Wittowsky play Lidia as a child, while 35-year-old Poots successfully passes for the high school and college-age Lidia). 

Since the fragments are so brief–even more so than the book's short chapters–sporadic voiceover provides an internal monologue; an expression of Lidia's feelings rather than a delivery system for exposition. Composer Paris Hurley, who provided the score for Rose Glass's pulpy thriller Love Lies Bleeding with Stewart, contributes to the sense of unease and discomfort. 

Lidia's dad, who recalls Jon Hamm on Mad Men, is a handsome creep; a reminder that not all sexual predators are unattractive men who can't hold down a job; they exist, too, but this kind is more likely to get away with it. 

Claudia leaves home as soon as she can, leaving Lidia defenseless until she goes away to college. For all her mother's faults, the real-life Yuknavich extends little sympathy to an unhappy woman who suffered from crippling depression compounded by a painful disability, a philandering husband, and an unsuccessful battle with the bottle. Lidia and Claudia deserved better to be sure, but Dorothy did, too, and her options were even more limited.

For Lidia, her mother's native Texas--Austin rather than Port Arthur--represents freedom, but left to her own devices, she develops an insatiable appetite for sex, drugs, and drink; a problem for any young person, but especially an athlete on scholarship. She also falls for Phillip, an aspiring musician, who tells her, "It's my father and my brother who have the real voices" when she compliments his singing–a bit of an inside joke, since he's played by Earl Cave, the son of Nick Cave (if anything, he is a better singer). 

Phillip is a good guy, but all Lidia knows is bad guys, so she keeps fucking up, but he has an inexhaustible capacity for forgiveness, and he becomes her first husband. There will be others after that relationship runs aground, as well as relationships with women, including a college friend (Esmé Creed-Miles), transgressive novelist Kathy Acker (not featured in the film), and an older dominatrix (nicely played by post-punk musician Kim Gordon). 

By the time Lidia ends up at the University of Oregon, where Ken Kesey (an excellent Jim Belushi) becomes her mentor, she's a mess, but so is he, with his great novels long behind him. In Lidia's memoir, she details his many shortcomings, but he encouraged her talent–Kathy Acker did, too–and it seems unlikely her book would exist without his fatherly guidance. 

Sometimes when two people meet while one is on the way up and the other is on the way down, they click in the middle. It's about timing as much as shared interests and compatible personas. If Lidia and Kesey had met at a different time, they might not have been able to connect in the same way.

Claudia aside, none of these relationships are built to last until Lidia meets Andy (Charlie Carrick), a writing student 10 years her junior who will become her husband and the father of their child. Just as Stewart and her spouse, producer Dylan Meyer, have collaborated on projects, like this film, Yuknavich and Mingo have worked together, most significantly on their own independent press. 

Beyond the fact that this is a well-made film from a neophyte writer/director who appears to have learned well from the art house auteurs with whom she has worked, like Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women), it's exceptionally well cast. Thora Birch hasn't had the easiest time of it since her American Beauty/Ghost World days, and she honors the faith Stewart, who also started out as a youth actor, puts in her.

Everybody else is pretty great, too, but Imogen Poots is fantastic. It shouldn't be news that she's a very good actor--from 28 Weeks Later to last year's Hedda--but she convinces in all of Lidia's many guises, including champion swimmer, reckless drunk, and established author and mother. 

Right: Ken Kesey to the left and Lidia Yuknavich to the right; he and his graduate students publishd a 1990 book called Caverns. 

It's often said that the book is better than the film, because it's often true, and The Chronology of Water, which started out as a short story, wouldn't have been possible without Lidia's life and work--something that affected Stewart so deeply she reached out years ago to visit the author, and the two became friends. As Stewart told Kate Dwyer, Yuknavich "changed or at least helped shape my relationship with expression itself; not a small thing.'

So, it isn't completely fair to say that the film is better than the book, but I preferred it, because Lidia can be a very performative writer. That isn't to suggest she's insincere, though she does classify herself as an experimental writer, an outlier. Her book always makes sense, and there's nothing wrong with a varied writing style, but as a screenwriter, Stewart cuts out a lot of the showy stuff to focus on the essence of incidents. It's not about making Lidia more likeable, since she does plenty of unlikeable things to herself and others, but about making her more relatable–and less eager to impress. 

A few years ago, Stewart acknowledged that she was having a hard time finding funding for her film, and it led to a lot of hand-wringing from critics in light of her achievements as an actor, but she found a way--filming in Latvia and Malta, for one thing--and she also found a distributor--The Forge--but not one of the big names you might expect, so her debut hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves, despite a six-minute standing ovation at Cannes and praise from the likes of Sheila O'Malley and Richard Brody.

Things might have been different if Kristen Stewart had cast herself, but she made the best choice, the right choice, in casting UK-born Imogen Poots to play all-American fuckup-turned-bestselling-novelist Lidia Yuknavich. 

She could have put herself front and center, and it might have pleased financiers, but she chose to honor the story of a woman who made sense out of her life through writing. I couldn't say for sure, but I believe the film served a similar purpose for its maker, who has really done herself proud. 

The Chronology of Water, which opened in Seattle on Jan 9, returns for a run at SIFF Film Center thanks to the Grand Illusion Cinema on Jan 30 and Feb 1, 12, and 18. Images from MK (Imogen Poots), Kino-Zeit (Poots and Thora Birch), Les Films du Losange / The Daily Beast (Susannah Flood, Michael Epp, and kids), The Forge (Flood), Variety (Jim Belushi), and Hawthorne Books (Ken Kesey, Lidia Yuknavich, and other students).  

Joy Wilkinson Reinvents the Erotic Thriller for a New Era in 7 Keys, Her First Feature Film

7 KEYS
(Joy Wilkinson, UK, 2024, 94 minutes) 

For her feature-film debut, British playwright and television writer Joy Wilkinson (Dr. Who, Lockwood & Co.) crafts a riveting erotic thriller. 

It begins as Lena (Emma McDonald, The Serpent Queen), a working-class single mother in London, dresses up for a night on the town–complete with oversized hoop earrings and short, fitted dress–to meet a man she met on a dating app. With a history of abandonment, she's eager for connection.

She waits and waits, but he doesn't show, so she commiserates with Daniel (1917's Billy Postlethwaite, rangy son of Pete Postlethwaite), whose date also ghosted him. "It's a big city full of assholes," she reasons (McDonald and Postlethwaite previously worked together in Paul Hart’s 2019 musical version of Macbeth and Wilkinson’s 2021 short "The Everlasting Club").  

Daniel keeps the key–or copy of the key–to every place he's lived, and he's lived all over the city, so she suggests they sneak into each one. He's put off by her assertiveness, and at first she seems like the predator, but he eventually relents. It injects excitement into her life, on the one hand; on the other, visiting his past helps Lena to better understand this stranger. It works until it doesn't. Then it all goes to shit. 

Lena didn't tell Daniel she has a seven-year-old son--she and his father share custody--and Daniel didn't tell Lena about his sociopathic tendencies, because why would he? He's a sociopath, and what starts out as an unexpected, adventurous date turns into a perilous battle for survival. 

For a $300K debut, 7 Keys is stylish, but not slick, with each section represented by a different color scheme and a score that ranges from suspenseful to ominous as Lena and Daniel reveal more of themselves, through words and actions, and the situation escalates from erotic to horrific (the film was shot by Mary Farbrother and scored by Max Perryment). 

If the ending could be more satisfying, the acting is always compelling, particularly from the  charismatic Emma McDonald. Until he turns aggressive and demanding, Daniel is more withdrawn by comparison, which Lena initially reads as timidity or cautiousness.

Neither victim nor superwoman, she takes risks to be sure–loneliness can do that to a person–but she's strong and resourceful, yet also openhearted and nurturing. Wilkinson doesn't press the point, but they're valuable qualities for a single mother...though her ability to read social cues could use work.

In her director's statement, the filmmaker explains the thinking behind a scenario both symbolic and plausible: "I've always been fascinated by keys. They're mythic objects in stories, unlocking secret places, other worlds, and even in our world, they have a magic. Children can't be trusted with them, which fueled my childhood fears of being homeless and my obsession with finding a home, primal drives that still fill my dreams and nightmares." She adds, "Keys had power to unlock new experiences. Illicit things." 

The end result plays like a post-millennial take on the 1990s erotic thriller with a woman of color given greater agency than the sidekick roles of yore. Lena reminded me of Stephanie Sigman's Laura in Gerardo Naranjo's original Spanish-language Miss Bala or Matilda Lutz's Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked Revenge. 

Those films have more gore, but all three women, accustomed to being underestimated, find reserves of strength when tangling with men too dazzled or tradition-minded to understand what they're up against. 

There's no slut-shaming here, just a story about loneliness in the big city and a vulnerable woman's desire for companionship gone very, very wrong. 

7 Keys premieres on VOD Jan 27, 2026. Images from the Jeva Films via IMDb (Emma McDonald) and Mashable (McDonald and Billy Postlethwaite).   

Nia DaCosta Brings Thrills, Chills, and Duran Duran to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE 

(Nia DaCosta, 2026, USA, 109 minutes) 

What has happened to it all?

Crazy, some'd say

Where is the life that I recognise? (Gone away)

--Duran Duran, "Ordinary World" (1993)

Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, the third film in a series--and first in a new trilogy--that began with 2002's 28 Days Later, ended with a cliffhanger that left some delighted and others pissed. Count me among the delighted. 

As last year's film came to an end, young Spike (the terrific Alfie Williams), who gets separated from his newly-widowed father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, missing in action this time around), has endured all manner of cancerous and rage-infected calamities and come out the other side, fully intact. 

 

Left: Spike and Jamie running from rage zombies in 28 Years Later

Then he runs into the bejeweled and velour track-suited Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, fresh from Ryan Coogler's Sinners and back for more villainy). Jimmy calls his followers Fingers: platinum blond cretins who look like a cross between the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 and the towheaded terrors of Children of the Corn. (Though he previously recalled odious British entertainer and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile, they've toned down that look this time around.)

The end. That was it. Until 28 days later...in film time.

Nia DaCosta, who was behind last year's revitalized adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, picks up where Boyle left off with Spike's induction into a hyper-violent subculture where every kid is a "Jimmy," a miniature version of their megalomaniacal leader, who reports to a never-seen "Old Nick." 

Spike is a brave and resourceful boy, but unlike his new companions, he's neither sadistic nor stupid. He will, however, do what it takes to survive–and possibly even to escape–even if it means murdering a fellow human being.  

 

Miles away lies the Bone Temple, an ossuary created by Dr. Kelson (a fired-up, iodine-coated Ralph Fiennes). 

 

I assumed he wasn't alive at the end of the previous film, but Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland--who wrote every film in the series except 2007's 28 Weeks Later--never definitively confirmed his fate, and DaCosta has, essentially, handed the sequel to the madman and the doctor. 

No offense to 15-year-old Williams--13 when the two back-to-back shoots began in 2024--but when you've got two uninhibited, road-tested talents like O'Connell and Fiennes at your disposal: it's the right thing to do. 

The result is a film that dispenses with the world-building to amp up the weird and the funny with even more what-the-fuck moments than before.

Once again left to his own devices, the good doctor becomes obsessed with Samson (6' 9" ex-MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry), the big, hulking, frequently nude "alpha" introduced in the previous film. True to form, Garland doesn't spell things out any more than necessary, but the brilliant, if lonely eccentric detects--or dearly wants to detect--the slightest trace of residual humanity in this vicious, bug-eyed creature, so he comes up with a plan to calm him down, and from there, to try to quell the psychosis that animates his kind. 

 

Though DaCosta didn't call on Scottish band Young Fathers, like Boyle--who first hired them for T2 Trainspotting--she introduces a side of Dr. Kelson previously unexplored, and it involves pop music, because he keeps a set of 1980s and '90s records in his bunker along with a functional player, so while he's toiling away on a project that could have monumental ramifications for the dwindling dregs of humanity, he has Duran Duran in all their synthy glory to buoy his spirits.

Just as Fiennes gave his all to the record producer he played in Luca Guadagnino's shockingly good La Piscine remake A Bigger Splash–in which he does a snaky sashay to the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" that has to be seen to be believed–he ups the ante here in ways sure to put a smile on the gloomiest of faces (he also joins Lewis-Parry in a bit of full frontal).

 

I've never seen a Shakespearean actor let his freak flag fly so high. Dr. Kelson's pop fandom is the light to the film's considerable dark, because it's otherwise as gory as the previous one--if not more so--with spine-snapping, chest-flaying, and plenty of Jimmy's upside-down cross version of "charity."

 

Everything comes together at the end with an electrifying showdown involving Jimmy Crystal, Dr. Kelson, Spike, and a surprising new friend (The Green Knight's Erin Kellyman, a kick in the pants) the kid made along the way. 

If you're all about themes, Garland, most recently of the unsparing docudrama Warfare with co-director and Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, has your back with cynical thoughts about religion, groupthink, and whatnot, but I enjoy this series for the enthralling fusion of action, ingenuity, and vivid characterizations.

I appreciate the larger themes, but they aren't what keep me coming back, and this entry offers an additional attraction: the return of Jim, the bicycle courier from the first film. I can't imagine Cillian Murphy, who won an Oscar for Christopher Nolan's 2023 Oppenheimer, would return after 24 years unless he had sufficient confidence in Garland's screenplay and DaCosta's direction, but he appears in a touching story line that seems likely to expand in the third (technically fifth) and final film to be directed by Danny Boyle.

 

Granted, the state of today's world, even without real-life rage zombies wreaking havoc, has had me tearing up at most anything, but the sight of Jim safe and sound–for the moment–made me a little misty. 

From her 2018 debut Little Woods through Hedda, with stops along the way for The Marvels and a Candyman sequel, Nia DaCosta has a solid track record, but there was no guarantee she was going to pull off this high-stakes sequel in such fine style, but I'll be damned: she does. And then some. 

 

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in Seattle on Jan 15 at SIFF Cinema Downtown and the usual AMC and Regal suspects. Images: Dexerto (Jack O'Connell and the Jimmys), People / Credit: Miya Mizuno (Alfie Williams and Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Sortiraparis (Ralph Fiennes), Reactor (Chi Lewis-Parry), and The Seattle Times / Sony Pictures (Fiennes and O'Connell).  

Blood's Thicker Than Mud: Jim Jarmusch’s Unsentimental Father Mother Sister Brother

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
(Jim Jarmusch, USA, 2025, 110 mins) 

You see, it's in the blood, both kids are good to mom, 

blood's thicker than the mud.--Sly & the Family Stone (1971)

After dancing to the beat of his own minimalist, post-punk drum for 45 years now, I wouldn't expect filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch to turn into a sentimentalist just because he's entered his eighth decade and, thank goodness, he hasn't. That would be a pretty disappointing turn of events.  

Much like 2005's Broken Flowers, though, in which Bill Murray's aging Lothario attempts to locate the son he never knew, Father Mother Sister Brother finds the 72-year-old filmmaker in a reflective, stock-taking mood. 

Though he's always kept his personal life to himself, Jarmusch has been in a partnership with producer/director Sara Driver for nearly 50 years, and the same daughter who inspired him to cast Selena Gomez in 2019's The Dead Don't Die, is now in her 20s. (For those unfamiliar with Driver's work, I suggest starting with her very good Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary.) 

In the first story, Father, two adult children, Emily (Mayim Bialik, most recently of Jeopardy!) and Jeff (Adam Driver, so terrific in 2016's Patterson) take a road trip to rural New Jersey to visit their estranged father (Tom Waits, who first worked with Jarmusch on 1986's jailbird picaresque Down by Law). 

Neither is looking forward to it. To them, he's just an old coot who's been cadging them for money for years. If anything, Jeff is the softest touch, while Emily is more skeptical (the actors are very good together). Only four years older than Jarmusch, Waits looks even older, though it's always a treat to see him on screen, especially in the films of Jarmusch and the Coen brothers, who have the best handle on his well-honed comedic skills. 

The three proceed to have an awkward, but not completely unpleasant visit filled with water and tea–Father isn't exactly living large. Or is he? It's clear they don't trust the guy, but they don't really know him either, since he keeps surprising them in various ways. It feels like there's something he's trying to say, possibly about his estate, since Jarmusch makes the most of pregnant pauses–something he's been doing since at least 1984's Stranger Than Paradise–but the conclusion relies more on actions than words. 

Mother presents a parent-child relationship from another perspective as a proper British mother (Charlotte Rampling) waits in her Dublin home for her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett, reuniting with Jarmusch after 2002's Coffee and Cigarettes) and Lilith (the ever-versatile Vicky Krieps), to drop by for a visit. The former looks like a square in her oversized glasses and sensible shoes, while the latter looks like a Fassbinder player with her pink hair and fake fur coat (though Catherine George designed the costumes, producer Saint Laurent, the French design house, made them).  

Another awkward tea party ensues, though not for the same reasons. Most everything Lilith tells her mother, a successful author, is a lie. She wants her to think she's a heterosexual with a wealthy fiancé, but she doesn't appear to be or to have either of those things (Irish actress Sarah Greene assists with the charade). Though Father has a conclusive ending, this story doesn't, other than to establish that the sisters, differences aside, get along well enough.Their mother, however, is like a stranger, though Timothea puts up a better front than Lilith, who may never meet with her approval. 

The film ends with Sister Brother in which twins Skye (Pose's nonbinary Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat, who made his feature debut in The Dead Don't Die) reconnect in Paris after the death of their parents (they're at least the second set of non-white twins to appears in a Jarmusch film after Spike Lee's siblings, Cinqué and Joie, in Coffee and Cigarettes).

One has short hair, while the other has long dreadlocks, but they both favor black leather jackets. They're also younger than the other siblings, in addition to more thoughtful and less anxious. If the brother swears by his daily micro-dose regimen, the drug-free sister is fine with the occasional shot of espresso. 

While paying their respects to the now-empty flat in which they grew up, they have an exchange with the landlady (Françoise Lebrun from Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, a Jarmusch favorite). It's a brief, but touching moment that wouldn't work as well with another actress. 

If their parents also come across as mysterious, there's less tension here with the not knowing; with the fact that there was a lot about their American-born parents they didn't know–and now they never will.

Father Mother Sister Brother is Jarmusch's fourth anthology film, though I wouldn't say it completes a quartet, since it's as different from the tales of cultural dislocation in 1989's Mystery Train as the dark nights of the driver-and-passenger souls in 1991's geographically-diverse Night on Earth as the comic vignettes about addiction and obsession in Coffee and Cigarettes.

Granted, there's a lot of driving in this film, shot by Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux from the front seat, so it feels like we're in cars with the characters as roads in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris stretch ahead of them into futures unwritten.

Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy, in which a pensioner struggles to place a bottle in a recycling receptacle in each film, Jarmusch includes certain details in each section: color coordination (Mother is fairly horrified), a Rolex that may or may not be real, toasts with water, tea and espresso ("Can you toast with tea?," asks the literal-minded Jeff), tables laden with beverages shot from above, and skateboarders snaking in front of and around moving vehicles before slowing down and speeding up again. 

The film begins and ends with an electric guitar-and-synth score from Jarmusch and German-British artist Anika (they both record for Sacred Bones). The music returns between each section alongside imagery that recalls Jeremy Blake's interstitials for P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. 

Anika also sings a couple of covers in her heavily-accented style, Classics IV's "Spooky," which  appears in its original form, as well, and Nico's "These Days." If a little wobbly on the former, she's quite effective on the latter. I'm not sure if there's any significance, but both songs debuted in 1967.  

Since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, where it won the Golden Lion, some critics have described Father Mother Sister Brother as a return to form, which seems like another way of saying that they didn't like The Dead Don't Die, his sole foray into zom-com territory, except Jarmusch's filmography has always had its ups and downs, so I wouldn't go that far.  

All told, it's one of his most understated films, even as it asks some of the biggest questions, like, "Can we ever really know our parents?" And, "Can we ever really know our kids?" In each case, the answer is a resounding no. 

Since I know little about Jarmusch's off-screen life, I couldn't say whether he took inspiration from his relationships with his parents or with his daughter, but only the third chapter asks: "Does it really matter?" He doesn't hesitate to provide a definitive answer...though yours may be entirely different. 

Father Mother Sister Brother opens in Seattle at SIFF Film Center on Jan 9. Image from The New Yorker via Bethuel / Vague Notion / MUBI (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat), Consequence (Tom Waits and Mayim Bialik), AP News (Françoise Lebrun), and First Showing (Moore and Sabbat).